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Sunday, 14 September 2014

Hamlet and the Jewish New Year

"I have
of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth” – Hamlet is
responding to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His friends are wondering why he is
so morose.And Hamlet goes on to
describe how the world, and the people in it, can be viewed – but also his struggle to hold on to his optimism
and delight with it all.

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action
how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!... and yet, to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...”

Over the last few years I
have been utilising some literary texts - King
Lear,Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – as a way of approaching some of the themes of
the New Year. This year Hamlet is my
jumping off point - though I mused on opting, topically, for ‘the Scottish
play’, Macbeth – ‘Present fears/are
less than horrible imaginings...what’s done cannot be undone...’But wherever we start, I feel we need all the
help we can get.And this year more than
ever.

Because we’ve taken a
battering over the year. Not only the personal stuff that afflicts us year in
year out: illnesses, deaths, losses of various kinds, failures and frustrations
and disappointments – all the stuff of daily life that we have to contend with,
that cast shadows over our sense of well-being, that dent our optimism, that
threaten to diminish our pleasure in life. That cause us to ‘lose all our
mirth’. Stuff that reminds us of our fragility, our vulnerability, our
mortality. And how our sense of meaning and purpose and the goodness of life is
easily shaken. We are all at risk in the world.And at this time of the year Judaism cajoles us into returning to this
densely-textured stuff of daily life and reflecting on it.

But this year, in addition,
we’ve had to contend with some larger themes: about Israel and the anguish of
war, again; and deaths again, deaths of ‘us’ and deaths of ‘them’; and all
thatwondering about the need for it,
the needlessness of it, our helplessness in it, struggling to find a response
to the threats and the suffering that isn’t a cry of anguish – or struggling to
find a worthwhile response along with a cry of anguish.

And then realising that it’s
not just about a struggle ‘over there’, but that it spills over into here - our streets, our homes - with questions that
we feel stirring within us, as we wonder about our security, people feeling
threatened as Jews – though in truth there’s little real evidence for it, but a
spurious Jewish Chronicle scare-mongering survey taps precisely into the Jewish
nervous system, historical and atavistic, that many Jews carry deep within
them.

We are actually living
through a golden age of Jewish life in the UK – its vitality is amazing, there
seems to be a Limmud every other week somewhere up and down the country, Jewish
cultural life like we’ve not seen before, Jewish schools and restaurants
opening and filled up, many synagogues are booming (OK, maybe not so much in
the provinces), but charities and grassroots Jewish organisations, secular and
religious, are flourishing, there’s music and books and arts and film
festivals– what a time to be Jewish
here in the UK.

But that visceral old anxiety
creeps in, has crept in, over this last year, to various degrees: ‘I have of
late...lost all my mirth’; and these gnawing anxieties, personal or communal,
become part of what we suffer from, part of what goes into this picture of
where we are now, part of what diminishes our capacity to enjoy the daily
blessings of life, which are manifold.

So this is where we are, as
we return to our tradition, and a time in our calendar (Selichot) that asks us
once more to reflect back on where we have been this last year, what we have
done, and not done, what we have felt, and not felt, what we have achieved and
what we have failed to achieve. It brings us back to ourselves: “What a piece of work is man” – yes, it
is awesome (awe-inspiring and sometimes awful) to reflect on our humanity, our
complexity.

We are ‘pieces of work’ –
Shakespeare’s text is a kind of secular midrash on Psalm 8, which talks of
human beings as aspects of God’s ‘handiwork’. What an extraordinary idea! What
would it mean to live, to really live, fully alive to, alert to, being part of
God’s handiwork in the world? Perhaps it’s too painful to keep ourselves aware
that we are woven into the divine filigree of all creation? Each one of us.
Each saint and sinner amongst us. Each frightened Israeli teenage soldier; each
terrified Palestinian child. ‘What a piece of work is man.’

“How noble in reason” – part of our nobility is that we have minds that can
think, that can reason, that can discriminate between good and evil (at least
theoretically), that can acknowledge that we are not only a prey to
emotionality and knee-jerk reactions, that we – unlike all other parts of God’s
handiwork – can reflect on our experiences, can reflect on our place in the
scheme of things, can dream of better worlds, can build better worlds. ‘What a
piece of work is man; how noble in reason’.

“How infinite in faculties”: yes, we are capable of love and compassion and
generosity and self-sacrifice – these are our faculties of heart and soul. This
is also what it means to be part of God’s handiwork – to have a ever-renewable
wellspring of moral instincts within us. And at this time of the year we are
called to return to them, to stir them up again within us, to find the courage
to live them, these divine facultiesgrafted to our souls.

“How infinite in faculties...in action how like an
angel” – well, this Bard knows how to
flatter us, comparing us to angels. Just like the Psalmist does, back in Psalm
8: ‘You have made humankind just a little less than the angels’. Here is poetry
to seduce us into thinking the best of ourselves, and our potential: that we
are created with an ability to join our thinking, our reasoning, our mental
capacities, with our moral imagination, and our ethical faculties, so that they
flow, we flow, into action : ‘in action how like an angel’. Like the Psalmist’s
religious vision, Shakespeare’s humanismsees us, reminds us, that we are the messengers of the Divine on earth.

“In apprehension how like a god” – ‘apprehension’ as in ‘powers of understanding’. It’s
an amazingly elevated view of humanity from Hamlet’s creator, allowing himself
the freedom, as does the Psalmist, to celebrate our special status in God’s
creation, as the pinnacle of creation. We are god-like in our powers of
perception, in the depth with which we can
understand things, in the heights to which we can aspire, in the breadth of what we can achieve. It’s good to be reminded of this. It underlies the
whole of the High Holy Days, which remind us over and over again, what we are
capable of as human beings – even if we fail at it, over and again, this task
of living true to our better selves.

And then, just when our minds
and hearts are bursting with these glimpses of who we are and what our
potential is, Shakespeare turns Hamlet’s paean of praise for humanity on its
head: ‘and yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...’ The
bubble of human glory and potential is burst. Like a kick in the teeth. Because
the other side of the story - and it goes back to the mythic opening of Genesis
- is that ‘Man’, Adam, Humanity is dust. Adam,
‘The Human’, from Adamah, the ground,
the earth: in Hebrew our generic name is always reminding us of how lowly we
are. We might be ‘little lower than the angels’, but we are still creatures of
flesh and blood who are as fragile as dust, as fleeting as the flowers of the
morning that wither in the evening, as transient as shadows, as dreams that
fade and die, a cup so easily broken – all the images of this New Year period flood
back to remind us of our mortality, and the tentative, tentative hold we have
on our earthly lives.

Here’s Shakespeare’s genius.
Hamlet’s low mood, his melancholy, comes not because of his awareness of the
double-sidedness of life – our god-like nobility in tension with our dust-like
transience and insignificance. This is wisdom - to appreciate this
double-sidedness. But his mood comes from his inability, his failure, to find
in himself any delight in the people around him. ‘And yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights not me
– nor woman neither...’ Me, me, me – this is Hamlet, a thoroughly
contemporary sensibility. Cut off from his capacity to take pleasure from the
world, and to enjoy other people. He’s lost in his own narrow world of
feelings. He’s stuck in the gap between his head and his heart. Even though he
knows that the people around him are wondrous – he can’t relate to them.
There’s no delight to be had in the company of others, men or women, no
emotional or physical contact will do it, nothing can breathe life into his
relationships.

It is a terrible thing to be
stuck in that place. It can happen to any of us. It does happen to all of us,
from time to time. We just hope and pray we don’t get too stuck in that place
personally. It’s terrible when it happens individually - but more terrible
perhaps (and we have seen it over and over in this last 12 months) is when this
happens collectively, politically, when there’s a radical failure in one group
of people to see the living, breathing humanity and vitality of another group:
it’s in the Middle East, all over; in Ukraine and Russia, in Africa, in the
ugly recesses of racism here, or in the rest of Europe. The curse of Hamlet –
being cut off from a vibrant, living, life-affirming connection to those
amongst whom we live.

The High Holy Days give us
the time to re-connect: with others, with our better selves, with our deepest
values, with our tradition of reflection and hope and its vision of change, that we can change. Time to remember
that – in ways we only glimpse out of the corner of an eye, if at all – the
world depends on our changing, our teshuvah,
our turning and returning. What’s always stressed at this time of the year is
that it is a personal journey we make through these days. And that’s true. But for
those of us who choose to do so, they are also days we share with others, with
community. And we can take pleasure in that. We are not alone. We have our own
unique experience of these days, of course- but we are not alone.

For those who engage in the
mythic narrative of Judaism, we share something over these days, over these
weeks. There is great solidarity in this, to journey as a people. If we are
feeling we have ‘lost our mirth’, lost our capacity for delight, then we can
look around us, look at what a piece of work our neighbour is: filled with
hope, like us, and anxiety, like us, filled with nobility, like us, with
doubts, like us. We are in this together. I hope it is a good New Year for all
of us, Jew and non-Jew alike.

[based on a sermon at the Selichot service Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 13th 2014]